“I knew I felt released after writing the novel, but I could never quite articulate it. And I think it was that – the shame that many abused people have to face down – I had done it in writing the novel.”

“Literature took me…to places where people overcome their limitations, and to places where they don’t. The latter may be the most important way literature engages us, reminding us of our common humanity.”

Historian and publisher of the renascent Baffler magazine, John H. Summers has not exactly taken a direct route to heading a publication whose significance he compares to Dwight Macdonald’s mid-century journal, Politics.